Gov't: Can't keep the Internet down

There's an interesting little legal battle brewing, over a site you may never have heard.  It's called WikiLeaks, and it's a whistle-blowing site where people can anonymously upload documents to blow the whistle on corruption.  Disgustingly, it was ordered shut down by US District Judge Jeffrey White.

He even went as far as having WikiLeaks wiped off the face of the Internet DNS system, which means you can't use www.wikileaks.org to reach it any longer.  However, the Internet is nothing if not resilient :)  You can still reach it by its public IP at http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks.  There is also an extensive network of alternative DNS names which point to WikiLeaks as well.  I think this is great--not only because WikiLeaks is an important site, but it's also important that government officials of all stripes know that they can't silence the Internet like that.

How, you might be wondering, can WikiLeaks thumb its nose at a court order like that?  Bullet-proof hosting:

Also making a take-down difficult, Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information, according to an unidentified individual who answered a press inquiry sent to Wikileaks.

I predicted this would happen eventually, I just didn't know it was happening already today.  Off-shore servers are the new off-shore banks:  untouchable, private, secure.  I say, give me some more of that.

Government lately has trended towards less transparency, not more. Credit markets are currently locked up--and have been for a while now--because the whistleblowers (Congress, OCC, OTS, FDIC) are not doing their jobs, instead demonstrating a frustrating reluctance to expose bankrupt companies.  Sarbanes Oxley is a joke in the financial world. If this isn't fixed soon we are headed for a 1930's-style DEPRESSION.

I actually hope people with access and a conscience will leverage WikiLeaks to expose companies which are unlawfully hiding losses off their balance sheets and restore transparency and trust to our economy .  It's not fair that Joe 6-Pack should have to suffer because the official cops are asleep on the watch.  We need MORE sites like WikiLeaks, not less.

If you're concerned about the current lack of honesty in our country and its effects on the people you know and love, it would be well worth your time to sign the petition to restore financial transparency to the USA.

Six Things You Should Know About the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve is one of those things that I grew up hearing about every once in a while on the noon business hour on the local news station here in Chicago, and I knew they had something to do with interest rates, but beyond that it never really crossed my mind.  I think they talked about it for about 10 minutes in college economics 101, but otherwise we mostly talked about supply and demand, trade, monopolies, etc.  I just kind of assumed it was part of the government and never really bothered to look into what it was actually about.

Well, on my honeymoon in Tahiti, I realized that everything was REALLY expensive for Americans, but not so expensive for everyone else.  The dollar had lost a lot of value since I'd gone to Europe a few years ago.  And then I started hearing Ron Paul talking about the abolishing the Federal Reserve.  So I did a little homework.  It was enlightening.

Chris Pirillo recently wrote a post "Is It Time to Abolish the Federal Reserve?", where he cites some interesting quotes from financial experts regarding the trouble that the Federal Reserve is causing around the world.  If you've never looked into the Federal Reserve on your own, you had better sit down Dorothy, because Kansas is about to go bye-bye.  This is quite a rabbit hole:

• It is NOT part of the United States government.  It is a privately owned group of 12 banks.  The truth is that The President (you would think that this would be done by Congress, but that's another topic) is allowed to appoint members of the Federal Reserve Board, who issue guidelines about how things should be run.  But it is not part of the government, it is a privately owned corporation.
• Nobody knows who owns it.  Yeah, the kicker to the last part is that we don't get to see who owns it, although I could venture a couple of guesses.  Because it is a private corporation, not a public corporation, it doesn't have to abide by SEC rules and therefore does not have to disclose ownership.
• It is constantly stealing your money.  Every time the Fed injects money into the economy, by buying bad mortgages, making account "adjustments" at member banks, or buying T-bills, the money in your bank account loses a little value.  It's called Inflation, and it only benefits a few select people.  The law of diminishing returns says that the farther away you are from the source of new money, the less value you get from it.  The Fed and its member banks derive a LOT of value from new money, because it originates with them, but its value diminishes with each successive transaction the money is involved in.  By the time it trickles down to you and I, we end up losing value.  And make no mistake, it can just create new money *poof*:  "The Federal Reserve can also create book-keeping credits in the reserve accounts of its member banks"
• It was created under cloak and dagger.  Literally.  It's such a normal part of life now that you may not realize it, but the way the Fed was founded, the promises that were made, and the deception involved would make a great spy movie:
  

  "I was as secretive, indeed I was as furtive as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress…I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System"

  Frank Vanderlip - President, National City Bank of New York

  Read about the early history of the Federal Reserve for more fascinating details.
• It caused the Great Depression.  Shortly after the system was put in place, the Fed reacted to a liquidity crisis by contracting the money supply.  Bad move.  As a result we got the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the big bad government we know and love today.
• It is illegal according to the Constitution.  Article 1, Section 8 states that "Congress shall have the power to create money and regulate the value thereof".  Congress no longer has anything to do with the process.

They don't teach you this stuff in school (our great educational system in action).  But this is not fringe conspiracy stuff, this is well-documented fact, just look it up on Wikipedia.  Better block out a couple hours if you do though, because you'll quickly learn that there's a lot you don't know.

Frankly I don't know how we would get rid of this thing without killing our economy temporarily.  I think we'd have to move to a new currency backed by gold, like the dollar was until Nixon took us off the gold standard in the 70's.  I'm hoping someone more educated than myself has a more elegant solution to this problem.

Finally, a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

"If the American people ever allowed the banks to control the issuance of their currency, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."

Wise man.

Online searchable instant messages: And, is privacy feasible?

As I was going through my instant messenger archives this morning looking for a fax number, I realized that what I wanted more than anything else in the world at that particular moment was a Gmail-style searchable archive of my instant messenger conversations.  A full-text indexed search on the client would be a step in the right direction, but not as useful to me as an archive online like Gmail offers.  I realized that what I really wanted is an instant messaging client that uploads my conversations to a central server for indexing and searching from a Web interface.  Preferably, where I could search email and instant messages all in once place.  After all, a message is a message, an instant message is nothing more than a short email with less overhead.

But that got me thinking about privacy concerns and hosted data.  I realized that I use Google mail services exclusively, and they have quite a bit of  my personal data.  Although I don't think Google would give up the data without a court order (I hope!), it still makes me slightly uneasy that one entity has that much of my personal information.  This probably wouldn't even have bothered me five years ago (and would probably be a very nice feature for corporations to assist with regulatory compliance), but with the boundaries of legal privacy continually eroding lately I am starting to believe that there will eventually be no privacy except for that which you yourself physically and/or legally own, exclusively.  This "war on tearism" and those darn "tearists" may be killing a lot of progress in the cross-fire here.

The more I think about it, this is really one more HUGE reason for an eventual shift to personal servers, if they're not made illegal first (that was sarcasm, with a hint of nervousness there...).  If I legally own the computer or hard drive or database on which my personal data is stored, and particularly if I'm able to control the encryption of that data, I would feel much better about the safety and privacy of my data.

"Popular" Republicans fear the YouTubes

The CNN YouTube debates (an interesting format and application of social networks, by the way, very cool) seem to have scared off the "popular" Republican presidential candidates, who suddenly developed scheduling problems just like I used to feel sick in the morning to try to get out of school.  Only Ron Paul, John McCain, and Tommy Thompson decided to show up.

Best comment on the thread:

"The memory of Youtube and Senator Allen defeat scared these GOP candidates to death.
After Allen defeat, they don’t want to be face to face with YouTube…It is a nightmare for them, it is the killer.

Ron Pual has nothing to fear; McCain & T. Thompson have nothing to lose."

Upgrading the Government

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting post about applying version control technology to congress to foster more transparency and maintain accountability for personal interest riders tacked onto legislation.  The whole thing is a good read, but what I like most is the thought he ends the post with:

"despite the many successes of our form of government, it's definitely creaking at the seams. The founders, for all their foresight, didn't plan for a nation of 300 million people, most of whom don't care to vote, they didn't foresee the extent to which the bureaucracy would become a fourth seat of power. I don't have any great prescriptions for politics, but I do have prescriptions for technology. We all need to think hard about how the future will not be like the past, focusing our efforts on that future and being willing to change course when faced with discontinuities that render our past thinking obsolete. "

I don't think technology is really rendering past thinking obsolete, but it certainly does provide new means to accomplish old goals.  I would rather rephrase that last sentence something like:  We all need to think hard about how the present is not like the past and how we can change course based on new tools that render past methods obsolete.

I think that it would be prudent for us, the generation who grew up with computers and the Internet, to take a long, hard look at the principles upon which our government was founded and see if there are new tools we should be using to uphold them.  If using some type of version control for legislation advances the principles of the framers of the Constitution then we should by all means start the implementation process.  If we look at the principles our country was founded on and see that the founders would have included the population in the legislative process in some way, if possible at the time, then by all means we should use the Internet to involve the population in the legislative process.  Maybe it's time we upgrade the government.

Perhaps it's time for a new political party, the Technology Party?

Commoditized Social Networks - My.BarackObama.com

One of the more genius ways to get press I've seen lately, not to mention a good idea in general, is Barack Obama's campaign recently announced my.BarackObama.com, a social network built around of course, Barack Obama (who just announced his presidential candidacy this weekend).  The site is a social network that allows you to send and receive messages, sign up for and initiate local events, create a list of friends, join groups, create a blog, and create your own little mini-fundraising campaign.

This is such a smart move on the part of Obama's campaign for a number of reasons:  a social network is a perfect way to coordinate people and bring them together for a specific purpose (e.g. a political campaign), being the first politician with his own social network is going to buy Barack a lot of free press (and a lot of tech cred), and setting something like this up is such a trivial task these days that it's almost a no-brainer.

The alternative to setting up their own social network would have been to use an existing network like a MySpace or FaceBook and simply set up a group or two within it.  By setting up their own network, however, they're able to brand it, tightly control the content, and I would assume build out features as the campaign rolls on.  Because of the centralized nature of social networks at present and the heavy hand of network owners like Rupert Murdoch, I think this is by far the better choice.

Somebody at Obama's campaign deserves some props for convincing them to launch their own social network instead of using an existing network.  The bar for building these network is dropping by the day, especially for networks like this one which don't really have any specialized features.  They're primarly using stock social networks features which you'll find in every social network on the planet.  The primary differentiator is that this site is built around the Obama campaign--but that, I think, is the perfect reason to build this network.  A presidential campaign is just about the perfect catalyst to launch a vibrant and USEFUL social network.

After peeking under the hood, I'm pretty sure that this site is using Drupal as the engine.  TechCrunch was making a big deal about the site and who built it, which leads me to believe that they've been snowjobbed into thinking that building a site like this is a huge undertaking (all those social networks out there begging for Arrington's attention have probably clouded his vision somewhat).  It's really not that big a deal to build a basic social network these days--and as a few people on the TechCrunch post have commented, social networks are becoming very commoditized.  That's why nobody cares anymore when somebody launches a social network around dogs, cats, or whoopee cushions.  HOWEVER, my.BarackObama.com is the perfect application of social network technology--bringing people together for a common cause and providing them with a tool to organize and facilitate their work.

As with anything, the motivation behind an effort is far more important than the effort itself.  If people are building a social network for the sake of building a social network (as has happened frequently over the last several years) it's not going to amount to much because they are indeed becoming commoditized.  But with strong ideas behind them, and good reasons to exist, social networks can be powerful tools to accomplish big things.

McCain Is Trying to Outlaw Files

Yes, you heard that right:  as if Sarbanes-Oxley isn't unenforcable enough, according to Declan McCullagh at CNet Senator John McCain is planning to introduce legislation (the "SAFE" act) which will make certain files (initially child pornography, real or fake, the line is as blurry as they get) illegal.  Apparently existing laws which require the reporting of illicit images are not enough, and so fines of up to $300,000 will be assessed against any service that allows user to send or receive communication which does not report any files on the government's black list.

Now I'm not sure if McCain was drinking one night and thought up this brilliant plan or actually has any IT people working for him... but how on earth does anyone expect this to actually be implemented?  Do they plan to mandate that this check against a global blacklist become part of the server operating system, thus making certain operating systems illegal?  How do they plan to build this black list?  Someone needs to send a message to the moon or wherever McCain is hanging out these days and tell him to stop legislating technology at LEAST until we get the current mess with SOX sorted out.  More unenforcable and vague legislation is NOT what we need, all it does is make consultants a lot of money and suck productivity out of the economy.

If Washington insists on legislating on technology, they need to establish a Department of Information Systems or something which has knowledgable, elected officials voted in by people who know a thing or two about technology.  Washington has a bad habit of tripping all over itself any time it touches technology, this is a bad situation that keeps getting worse, and it needs to be fixed.  I hope this legislation dies, but if it does not I hope it kills McCain's presidential run on grounds of crippling the economy.

You Are Not a Username

I was talking with my business partner Chris Crosby yesterday about a great post he wrote about social networking in politics.  Our conversations frequently run into the hypothetical whiteboard "what if" category, and this one was no different.  We started talking about the different Web 2.0-style political sites that are out there right now, and what possibilities are out there to leverage social technology to empower people to make a difference in politics.

Chris started talking about a few different sites he's found that are Web 2.0-like--wikis and blogs, things like that.  I floated the idea that I'd never really found a "real" social network based around politics, and I think there's a lot of potential in that area to leverage user-generated content and ranking systems to cull interesting and important topics from the community.

Anyway, we started talking about the possibility of integrating the various sites that are already out there somehow, harvesting useful information from them and layering social technology such as voting, commenting, and meme threading on top of them.  That's when it really hit me:  a social network really is just a layer on top of an existing network.  It's not a network in and of itself, it just adds value to what already exists.  The network, of course, is the Internet itself.  All of those sites that already exist can easily be made into part of a social network if you don't insist on one central site controlling and owning the content.

I've been thinking around this idea for a long time now without really getting it.  A lot of my posts (see How to Protect Your Online Identity) have been directed towards the idea of forming your online identity around your personal Web site, and the more I think about it the more that idea makes a whole lot of sense to me.  The problem is, it's difficult to extend that idea into the social network concept because that's not the way any of the existing social networks work.  Except for one.  With all the talk of online identity as i-Names, Infocards, and all the other (I believe) confusing and unnecessary technologies out there, we've lost track of a really huge social network already forming before our eyes, which is vibrant and thriving:  the blogosphere.

If you think about it, the blogosphere really is itself a social network.  The rules are much looser than in a tightly controlled environment like a MySpace or a LinkedIn, but all the components are there:  relationships (trackbacks and comments), unique identifiers (URLs), messages (comments), individual expression (highly customizable layouts and infinite customization), groups (blog networks), and a highly effective way to find people (Google).  Your blog is a node on a massive global social network, and your identity is your URL--not a username.

Extending this concept directly into social networking, the social network functionality could easily be layered on top of the blogosphere.  In fact, services like Technorati and Tech.Meme already hint at this.  But beyond that, I believe that blog networks really are the next logical step for the evolution of social newtorks.  Not in their current form, however, I believe that more functionality is needed beyond a simple directory listing or categorization.  That functionality can easily be built on top of the content from the sites themselves, which is readily available in RSS form.

By opting to join a network, participating sites contribute their content to the network which takes that content and aggregates it on the community site.  Members are allowed to comment, rate, and interact with it all in one place.  User profiles are extremely simple--the member's site URL, RSS feed URL, and a link to their about page from their site.  It doesn't matter if the member site is built in TypePad, WordPress, or MySpace, because you can get content via RSS from any of them and contribute it to the community.  All you need to belong to this network is a Web site.

I think this is an area that needs to be explored further because I really don't like the concept of having a separate account at every site I belong to.  It really should revolve around my personal Web site, wherever that may be, and that should be the end of it.  It's a simple matter of relabeling the blogosphere as a social network and layering some existing technology on top of it to add some more value.

Idea #21: The Internet will change politics forever

As I wrote about yesterday, I think it's inevitable that the major media networks that have a big influence on what we see and hear today are headed for extinction.  Beyond giving us more entertainment choices, this is going to have a huge impact on politics.

When there are only a few conduits of information into a person's mind, it's relatively easy to control their information diet.  However, as the information channels become decentralized and migrate away from networks and offer people direct access to the content producers, controlling information becomes a much trickier task.  Trying to do spin control becomes almost impossible.

Media networks and government have a long and sordid history together.  For as long as mass media has been around, government has tried as much as possible to control the information that went out over it--through intimidation, bribery, kickbacks, and favoritism.  And they've been largely successful, simply because if somebody got kicked out of the game there was nowhere else for them to go--there was no such thing as an independant news source, unless you count HAM and shortwave radio, or public access TV.

The traditional barriers to entry in politics--namely, party support and the funds to advertise on major media networks--are going to fall soon.  When that happens it's going to open up the political process to people who previously couldn't afford a ticket to the game.  I'm sure there will be some kickback from career politicians because it's going to threaten their careers.  However self-interested people who aren't thinking of the greater good need to be removed from office anyway.

The disintegration of large media networks and the dismantling of information gatekeepers will be a great moment in political history.  As they're weaned off of the major media networks, for the first time in recorded history people will be free to truly decide for themselves where to get their information and ignore sources that haven't proven to be trustworthy.  I don't see how this can result in anything but a richer and more diverse range of choices than we have today, which is DEFINITELY a good thing.

Part of the 60 Ideas in 60 Days series.  Click here for the rest of the ideas.

Idea #4: Protect your biometric data

Here in the Chicago area we have a supermarket called Jewel-Osco which lets you pay by touch with your fingerprint.  I think this is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen.

I will NEVER give my fingerprint to ANYONE.  Why?  Because Jewel-Osco has to keep a record of your fingerprint on a server somewhere, and that server can be compromised.  What happens if the backup tape that has your fingerprint on it falls off the back of a truck?  It's pretty hard to reset your fingerprint.

Protect your biometric data like it's pure gold.  You only have one body, you can't reset it or send for a replacement.

Part of the 60 Ideas in 60 Days series.